This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
I still went to class. I still managed to get all A’s my first year in criminal justice because I was terrified of losing my scholarship. Previously, I had blown off engineering classes, not taking them seriously at all, and drinking hard. One night, something happened that poured gasoline on everything. I entered an online poker tournament with a $10 buy-in that started at 3:15 a.m. By around 8:00 a.m., I won it. The payout was about $800. Back then, that was an absolute fortune. My checking account often didn’t even have that much money in it. Winning that tournament made me feel invincible. I felt like a god. And from that moment on, poker stopped being a hobby and became something I chased relentlessly, convinced I had finally found something I was meant to dominate.
After a full year of losing—losing momentum, losing confidence, losing any sense that my life was moving forward—I was getting ready to move out of that apartment with one brutal realization hanging over me: I hadn’t hooked up with a single person there. Not one. The place that was supposed to represent freedom and adulthood had turned into a dead zone. Around that time, a friend casually mentioned that there were escort companies listed right there in the phone book that you could just call. I remember thinking, no fucking way. It sounded fake, like an urban legend. Then immediately after that, I thought, I have to try this.
By my twenty-first birthday, paying for sex felt like a logical next step rather than a red flag. I told myself it was efficient, controlled, and free of rejection. The experience itself briefly inflated my confidence, but the emotional aftermath was more revealing than the act. Instead of feeling connected or healed, I felt validated in a hollow way. What disturbed me most wasn’t that I’d paid for sex—it was how normal it felt, how easily I justified it, and how quickly it seemed like something I might rely on again.
Around that same time—actually a little before the escort—I’d started going to bars without even trying to hide my age. Nobody carded me. I’d just walk in, order drinks, and start drinking like I belonged there. Sometimes I went with friends. Sometimes I went alone. I’d have friends drop me off at Five Points, then I’d walk all the way back to Whaley’s Mill afterward, which was miles from the bars. One night, around 3:00 a.m., I cut through a public park and saw a guy standing there. He called out to me and asked if I wanted some “grass.” I had no idea what he meant at first. When he said weed, I figured, fuck it, why not. I was already smoking a cigar, so he sold me a five-dollar bag. I handed him the money and admitted I had no clue what to do with it. He took my cigar, stuffed the weed into it, and tried to light it for me. Neither of us could get it going. The weed was damp, my lighter was shitty, and I was drunk, drooling on the cigar like an idiot. Eventually we got it lit, and I walked down a street nearby—one of the main roads—smoking a cigar packed with weed, completely exposed, like a total dumbass. When I finally got home, nothing happened. No high, no noticeable effect at all. That was my first time smoking weed. I popped that cherry right alongside paying for sex.
Looking back, what stands out is the progression. I didn’t just go off the deep end overnight. It was a steady sequence of choices that left me feeling worse and worse about myself. One night during this period, I nearly died from drinking. The only reason I didn’t choke to death was dumb luck. We were watching Pulp Fiction, and I’d turned it into a drinking game with Tanqueray. Every time there was a gunshot, or someone got shot, or Mia got the needle in her heart, I took a shot. When Marvin got shot in the back seat, I took a shot. When there was gunfire, I took a shot. I threw in a few extras for good measure. On some night around then—maybe the same one, maybe another—I did four back-to-back Tanqueray shots like they do in Super Troopers. I was constantly reenacting stupid movie shit like that.
I started the movie sober. By the time it ended, I was obliterated. I threw myself face-first onto my bed and passed out. I woke up in the dark, my bed soaked, not knowing what the hell had happened. I felt around and realized something was very wrong. Then the nausea hit. I staggered to the toilet and started throwing up, and that’s when it dawned on me that I must have puked all over my bed. I was too drunk to deal with it. I went back and lay down in it. I cleaned it up the next day. That was my life at that point—spiraling, getting darker, more chaotic, more self-destructive.
Eventually, even I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I realized I needed to get out more, because whatever I was doing clearly wasn’t working. I needed a job, some structure, a reason to be around people again. I was getting dangerously antisocial. Through a friend who still worked on campus, I managed to get a job as a resident hall advisor again. That decision—just trying to put myself back in a structured environment—ended up being one of the few stabilizing moves I made during that stretch. It didn’t fix everything, but it slowed the descent enough for me to survive it.
Senior year is where everything really blew up. I felt like I’d arrived. I was twenty-one, so I could finally buy alcohol legally, and I had just joined Facebook. I started friending random girls I could see were about to start school before the semester even began. The first night after move-in, I had seven girls in my dorm room. Just me. Seven girls. Several of them were legitimately hot, beautiful girls. A couple were just friends tagging along, but I remember thinking, holy shit, I’ve come a long way since freshman year. Seven girls in my room by myself, and they were there because I had alcohol. I had handles and handles of liquor stacked in that room.
Junior year had been rough with women. Freshman and sophomore year, girls saw me in ROTC uniforms all the time and liked that. Junior year, ROTC was gone, and I lived in football jerseys. I asked a girl I’d made out with before what I was doing wrong, and she told me straight up that I dressed like shit and needed to dress better if I wanted girls to be interested. So senior year, I went all in. I bought these shiny, satin, silk shirts—exactly the kind of stuff gay or metrosexual guys wore back then. I bought them in every color: gold, black, silver, white, short-sleeve, long-sleeve. I spent a few hundred dollars on those shirts. And it worked. I was wearing that stuff with a room full of freshman girls, alcohol everywhere, and they were on me.
We started doing shots, and eventually they wanted to go find more guys, which still blows my mind because there were seven of them and one of me. I said sure, and we picked up a couple more dudes. The plan was to go to a club, but everyone was so fucked up we just wandered around town instead. We had a water bottle full of Bacardi. One girl I was trying to hook up with got completely shithoused, throwing up, her dress falling half off her, and I ended up carrying her back to the dorm. That killed any interest I had. I went to bed alone that night.
Things escalated fast after that. I realized I could make money selling liquor to freshmen. I could buy a handle of shitty McCormick vodka for around ten bucks and flip it. That stuff came in plastic bottles that cracked and leaked all the time, and when they did, I’d just drink them because I wasn’t going to sell a leaky bottle to anyone. McCormick vodka was disgusting, but it didn’t matter. I was making money. Thousands of dollars. I’d never made money like that in my life. I felt like Scarface. People would call my cell phone, come up to my room, and I’d show them the collection like a dealer, sending them out with a couple of handles and pocketing twenty or thirty dollars profit per a transaction. I was moving boxes of liquor—nine handles at a time. A quarter of the building must have been getting their liquor from me.
That’s when shit started getting weird. Another RA got jealous because girls were constantly around me, even though I was still missing obvious signals. One beautiful blonde girl tried to get me to “study calculus” with her. She came to my room and eventually asked if we could have more privacy so she could concentrate. I closed the door, thinking it made no sense to need privacy to study calculus, completely missing that she was trying to hook up with me. She eventually left when I kept trying to actually help her study and made no attempt to hook up. Stuff like that kept happening.
Meanwhile, the guy below me was throwing even crazier parties. His room was packed wall to wall—thirty people in a one-bedroom dorm room, tons of hot girls. The dorm had twice as many guys as girls, but a floor full of the girls were in his room. One night, I pulled a cute girl out of that chaos and brought her up to my room, completely blind to what that night actually meant for her—something she only told me at the end of the year, and it stunned me. I ended up dating her for a few weeks. We had sex, and it was awkward, not great, but it felt good in a different way because it was the first sex I’d had in a year that I hadn’t paid for. I even had her watch Pulp Fiction, like some twisted rite of initiation. Eventually, I got bored. She wanted to see other guys, and I told her to go for it. I’d find someone else. At that point, everything felt unhinged. I was drinking, selling liquor, missing signals, hooking up randomly, and living like none of it had consequences.
Then one of the other RAs fucking snitched on me. He told my boss that I’d offered to drunk-drive freshman residents to Sonic one night around 4:00 a.m., which was absolutely true. I had offered that. By that point, drunk driving was already part of my life. I hadn’t done it much my first year of drinking, but sophomore year it started. One night I was lonely, my friend was hooking up with some girl, and we were sharing a room during the summer. He kicked me out so he could hook up, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I just wanted to drive. More specifically, I decided I wanted to go to Walmart at 2:00 a.m. and buy a gun. I remember thinking, everyone else has a gun, why don’t I have one? Let me buy my first shotgun.
So I drunk-drove to Walmart at two in the morning. Of course, the gun counter was closed. That was my first time drunk driving. Looking back, it’s hard to overstate how fucking stupid that was. After that, it stopped feeling like a big deal. I drove drunk all over the place. One night I hit another car in a parking lot—not hard, just bumped it. I looked around, backed out, and parked somewhere else. No note. No insurance. Just, fuck it. If nobody knows who did it, it’s like it didn’t happen, right? That was my logic. So yes, I was offering to drunk-drive people. I was drunk driving all over creation.
So this guy rats me out. He goes straight to my boss. Not long after that, my boss confronts me—while I’m drinking—at one of our work meetings. It’s 8:00 p.m., which already felt absurd to me. You can’t schedule a college work meeting at eight at night and expect people not to be drinking. I had a drink with several shots in it right there at the meeting. My boss brings up my drinking and the accusations, and I’ve literally just put the cup down. At that point, there’s no way to fully lie. So I tell him the truth, at least part of it. I tell him I’m struggling with alcoholism. I say the other RA is exaggerating, but yes, I’ve been drinking around the residence halls. Thankfully, he has no idea I’ve been selling alcohol to the entire fucking building. Somehow that never came up. That guy must not have known or didn’t mention it. Lucky me.
I played the remorse card. I told my boss I was going to work on my drinking, that I was going to change. Whether I believed that or not at the time, I said all the right things. He told me I needed to do something concrete to show I was serious and put me on probation. When he asked what I was going to do, I said I’d go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
What made this even more surreal is that right around the same time—basically overlapping all of this—I wrecked my car. That ended up helping my case, ironically. I could tell him I didn’t even have a car anymore, so I couldn’t drunk-drive anyone. The timing was tight. I still had my car during the initial confrontation, but not long after, it was gone.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.